by Uchita de Zoysa(uchitadezoysa@gmail.com)
I was invited by OECD to speak at the side event organized during the recent 13th Asia Pacific Forum on Sustainable Development. The topic of the event was “Policy Coherence for Sustainable Development and Resilient Transitions: Strengthening Risk-Informed Approaches Across Water, Cities, Infrastructure and Partnerships”.The question raised to me was “from your rich regional and national experience, what are the main coordination gaps still preventing coherent and resilient transitions, and what partnership approaches show the most promise to address them?”. Following is a summary of my presentation.
1. Introduction: The recent Ditwah Cyclone demonstrated the high vulnerability of Sri Lanka to climate change and also exposed the nations weakened resilience to absorb shocks. This was a far bigger infrastructure damage than the 2004 Tsunami and rebuilding approach is siloed and lacks coherent planning. Therefore, any repeat of such a natural will be disastrous as well.
2. Policy Coherence for Reforms & Sustainability (PC4R&S): Since early 2025, the Centre for Environment and Development (CED) has been conducting consultations, mapping and inclusive strategy planning labs across the provinces and districts of Sri Lanka. Taking a Political-Policy-Private-People approach for engagement, we are mapping the Policy-Legal-Institutional-Political Reforms for the short, medium & long term. We have proposed Provincial Sustainable Development Plans and Roadmaps. The Norther Province of Sri Lanka is ready to move PC4R&S into a Sustainability Roadmap and Strategy Plan but is still waiting for financial support.
3. Fragmented Planning: Fragmented and siloed planning across sectors prevents holistic planning that creates gaps in resilience building. Disproportionate Focus on Development Integration across regions weakens localising the transformation and financing at national and sub-national levels has a large gap. In 2024, CED helped formulate a draft Natural Capital Valuation Roadmap for Sri Lanka promoting Ecosystems Services based Financing and innovative instruments for Nature Based Solutions for inter-intra generational equity to facilitate making trade-off more accountable and just.
4. RECOMMENDATIONS:
a. Advance Integration: Policy planning and implementation needs greater integration between environmental, social and environmental dimensions to ensure sustainability across sectors and thematic areas to build resilient systems and address increasing vulnerabilities.
b. Uphold Subsidiarity: An inclusive transformation at national and sub-national levels is vital to ensure ecosystem services driven resource mobilization for prosperity and wellbeing of the people and to advance sustainable development.
c. Eco-climatic Zonal Mapping: In-coherent and outdated provincial and district governance structures has created serious conflicts and inefficient implementation. Climate change demands us to conduct Eco-climatic Zonal Mapping for greater coherent and effective governance.
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